VRI uses our own Vital-Link software package to manage our customers’ tape inventories.
Written and supported by VRI’s technology staff, Vital-Link is a web-based product that has automated the entire discrepancy verification and online inventory processes.
Vital-Link is designed to interact with virtually any Tape Management System or backup software. Even if your tape management has no automation at all, you can still use Vital-Link – we give you the ability to manually create a listing online.
The only requirement is that your tapes must be bar-coded. If they aren’t, VRI can supply bar-coded labels for you. VRI’s Vital-Link is designed so that it can be used by anyone.
Vital-Link
VRI uses our own Vital-Link software package to manage our customers’ tape inventories. Written and supported by VRI’s Technology staff, Vital-Link is a web-based product that has automated the discrepancy verification and online inventory processes.
DISCREPANCY VERIFICATION is really the heart of the product. All tape movement, into or out of VRI, is verified by VRI tape librarians utilizing the latest scanning technology. Vital-Link compares the VRI physical scan against an electronic tape movement report supplied by the Customer. This all happens within hours after the tapes are picked up from the Customer site. At a minimum, each Customer receives emailed reports from VRI that display any extra tapes (tapes that VRI received that were not on the Customer list) and any not scanned tapes (tapes that were on the Customer list, but were not received at VRI). If everything matches with 100% accuracy, the Customer will receive clean discrepancy reports.
An ONLINE INVENTORY is maintained for all of VRI’s Vital-Link Customers. At any time, from any place, authorized users can log onto Vital-Link to view and query their inventory. If a tape is here at VRI, it will be displayed. In addition to the tape’s bar-code number, each Customer has the option of supplying VRI with additional information such as the tape’s create date and return date (if known). We also supply an optional Dataset field of up to 80 characters where a Customer can add descriptive information about each tape (typically server name, backup type, department name, etc.). All of these fields can be queried, so each Customer’s query capabilities are directly tied to how much information they supply us. If something was included on the incoming tape movement report, then they’ll be able to query it.
If you do have some type of automated system, you can upload an existing listing directly into Vital-Link or you can use SFTP to send the reports directly to us using secure 128 bit SSL encryption.